Poems of Robert Stead—Kitchener and Other Poems—or in The Empire Builders (Musson Book Co.: Toronto).
CHAPTER XX
The Restoration Period
THE RESTORATION OR SECOND RENAISSANCE PERIOD IN CANADIAN LITERATURE—NEW FORMS, THEMES, AND SOCIAL IDEALS—THE POETS—MARJORIE PICKTHALL—ROBERT NORWOOD—KATHERINE HALE—AND OTHERS.
We call the period beginning with the publication of Marjorie Pickthall’s first volume of verse, Drift of Pinions (1913), and on to the present, the Restoration or Second Renaissance Period in Canadian Literature. It is a ‘restoration’ period because it marks a return, after the Decadent Interim of the Vaudeville School (1907-1912), to the aesthetic and artistic ideals of the first systematic group of native-born Canadian writers. It is a ‘renaissance’ because the writers of the period undertook the systematic production of original authentic literature, and because they wrote under the inspiration of new themes, ideals, and forms.
By 1913 when the Canadian public had tired of the picaresque themes and the plashing anapaests of Robert Service, and the vogue of the Vaudeville School had passed, there was a demand for clean and sweet sustenance of the soul and refreshing new verbal music for the spirit. It was a demand for pure Beauty—
of fragrance made,
Woven and rhymed of light.
Marjorie Pickthall was the first to give the Canadian public sweet draughts of a new poetic wine of life. She engaged the attention of the Canadian public with the same immediacy and delight as the early lyrics of Tennyson and Swinburne captivated the English lovers of poetry. Set for the most part to a new or, so far as Canada was concerned, a strange music of trochaic, anapaestic, and syncopated metres and rhythms, rich in vowel-harmonies and the tone-color of consonance, assonance, and exquisite alliteration, her songs changed the world about her into an earthly paradise. At first Marjorie Pickthall arrested attention as a young unknown poet singing shyly from a corner in a daily newspaper or magazine, but singing with a rare beauty of imagery and of color from Nature, and with a fresh and dulcet verbal melody, heard as overtones above the more plashing, plangent rhythms of Service and his colleagues. It seemed as if Pan had come again to earth, so idyllic was the Nature-beauty and so simple and dulcet was the melody of her poetry, as in, for instance, The Little Fauns to Proserpine, daintily suggestive of their shadowy figures:—
Browner than the hazel-husk, swifter than the wind,